Slashdot

arcticstoat writes "Next week, the G8 summit will discuss proposals for new international piracy laws, which include border controls and cooperation from ISPs to identify pirates. The laws will also prevent ISPs from being liable for copyright infringement. If the G8 summit were to agree on these measures and enforce them through international cooperation, could they really cut down piracy, or would they be impractical to enforce?"

Actually, I am sorry for the webmasters. They have to deal with this. OTOH it IS part of the job.

I don't know what you folks expected. The web is infested with all sorts of malicious code. Are users not supposed to protect themselves in the interests of the website? After we manage to make the browsing experience safe for "teh n00b" then this won't be a problem. So all we have to do is get all webpages standardized, sanitized, and secured. That includes all the people using IE.

Another option is that we could stop promoting the Internet as a good tool for consumer level financial transactions. Then there won't be ANY need for privacy and security. Then we might not have jobs either.

It is yellow journalism to report this story in this way. Another way to put it would be "AVG forces issue of PC Security versus bandwidth usage." Then they look like heroes instead of villains. You're just putting spin on the issue because this is affecting your cost/income ratio.

Since AVG is producing something that helps end-users do you really want to be seen as a promoter of the problem? Since the problem of malware sites is not going to go away and since AVG is effective more antivirus software will start using these techniques. Unless you have something better to suggest?

Frankly, as an end user, I don't give a damn about your costs and stats. I don't care about it for amazon, ebay, myspace, or paypal. I do care that if I follow a link to an unsavory site that I am protected.

Here is another question. Do you want a userbase that is populated by malware infected computers? Is that preferable to figuring out a way to work with AVG new technique?

Dont throw your users under the train. They have a right to their security and peace of mind.

> on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now

Come on Taco... proper English (or at least something seemingly like it) isn't that hard... is 6% exactly, around 6% or really just 'like 6%'

I honestly like, do not recall like the last time I like, saw someone use 'like' in that long standing improper way in like text, it's always like, been for me, like only something a person like, verbalizes.

I've had it with your closed, proprietary OS and file formats!

I'm getting an iMac with iWork.

if you google it, you can install with command line switches to not even install this part of the program.

and thus you dont need to disable it, and thus you dont get the "somethings wrong" icon (which i just autohide anyway).

and as to AVG being slimey, get real.

The SLIMEY bastards in the anti-malware, anti-virus world are symantec and macafee.

both install horribly bloated piles of horse dung which attempt to hijack everything a user does, and prevents themselves from being disabled easily for testing purposes.

AVG provides a product that for the most part is ABSOLUTELY FREE.

thus if you dont like it, dont use it.

and as for the user agent strings, i'd be willing to agree with the poster above about them being legit looking IE strings to prevent possible redirection based on them if they used their own, by malware laden and virus laden sites.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the transforming nature of the Web now that Tim Berners-Lee's early vision has been supplanted by today's much more complex model. AJAX, Google Web Toolkit, Flash and Silverlight all have McAllister asking, 'Is [the Web] still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? Is it still the Web if the content can't be indexed and searched? Is it still the Web if you can only view the application on certain clients or devices? Is it still the Web if you can't view source?' Such questions bely a much bigger question for Web developers, McAllister writes. If today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning these apps into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs?" If the point of 'The Web' is to allow direct links between any 2 points, is today's web something entirely different?

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.

Whorhay writes "A Dutch doctor and a violin maker from Arkansas have compared five classical and eight modern violins in a computed tomography (CT) scanner. Apparently the 300-year-old violins are made of wood with a more consistent density than the modern violins. They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius violins their unique sound, but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit." Unfortunately science has yet to explain how how all three chords I know ROCK on my SG.

Your right, such a project would produce unacceptable levels of vacuum emissions into earths atmosphere. But this could be a good thing!: Production of Vacuum tubes and Cathode Ray Tubes in the 20th century used up all the easily available vacuum on earth (mined from the air which contained precious little vacuum! - bringing it down from space is not cost-effective!) humanity had to make do with the transistor and now we have to change to LCD screens since CRTs are no longer profitable to manufacture. But this could change things!

You can't steal data. Its a physically nonsensical concept. The only way I can see actual theft working is if you were to use quantum teleportation to extract the electrons from one persons computer and place them in your own.

Distribution of trash media is part of what helps level the playing field. It means that people used to getting their data through conventional means now get it through the new medium, and thus are looking in the right place to find user generated content.

Punkster812 writes "Mozilla has gotten the results back from the Guinness World Records and the official number that will be set as the record is 8,002,530 downloads. The day started out a little rough for them, with server troubles during the initial launch, but once they got everything going, they were able to transfer 62,419,734 MB in 24 hours. You can get more information, including a breakdown of how many downloads each country did from around the world, by visiting spreadfirefox.com. Congratulations, Mozilla, on the new record."

Marzubus writes "I tend to do a lot of code editing in vim and sometimes get the 'burning eyes' or headaches. I have been trying to find a background / foreground combination for my terminal sessions which is easiest on the eyes but cannot seem to find any real data on this subject. Does anyone know of a study / data on this topic?"

One of our great lawmakers here once said in a TV interview that a good solution would be to simply ban file sharing!

The interviewer asked if she meant all kind of sharing, like if he had a document he had written him self on his computer and wanted to share it, would it be illegal? And the great lawmaker answered: "We are talking about files here, not documents and stuff like that."

The point is: They haven't got a clue! The haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. But that doesn't stop them from passing laws...

psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.

Which is why firmware upgrades like how MS/Nintendo/Sony have them are a bad idea. Rather then just small patches, a lot of them overwrite a lot of the base code. It would be like rather then just patching Windows, you formatted your HD and started over from backups, now the firmware upgrades aren't exactly like that, but it is similar to the risks that it takes. And most firmware updates don't *need* to be done in the first place, and the makers certainly shouldn't prevent you from online play if you don't upgrade unless it would be a natural by-product of the upgrade (like the online play server was moved or something). But really, upgradable firmware in game consoles is just a bad idea to use.